Guest Post: Electric Trash Trucks of Beijing

A guest post by Jeff Stracco, who blogs about classic Chinese bikes at www.flyingpigeonproject.org:

OK. The headline is a lie.

There are no garbage trucks in Beijing and they certainly are not electric. Instead there are a variety of pedal powered trikes, which serve as garbage trucks. See, in Beijing’s tight warren-like Hutongs (alleyways), a US type Mack garbage truck would never fit. But these bikes go there with ease.

Beijing probably produces a lot less trash than a comparable sized American or European city because most everything that can be recycled gets recycled. Independent contractors go from store to store and restaurant to restaurant and pick up plastic, steel, aluminum, cardboard and Styrofoam and then pedal it out to collection centers on the edge of town.  Some of the loads get absurdly enormous. Here is a small one.

But these trikes CAN be electrified and often are. It’s quite a simple affair usually. Here is a moving “van”. The battery is a car battery in the cardboard box on the flatbed.

A bit more sophisticated is this purpose built trike delivering Na’an bread to a Uyghur restaurant. The battery is located behind the steel panel just in front of the right wheel. The motor is the black/silver object immediately behind the wheel, hanging from the underside of the bed. The bed flips up dump truck style.

But whether moved by electric power or just plain old leg strength, all sorts of goods are delivered on three wheels, including coal…

…and more importantly, BEER!

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